So realizing, he forced, literally forced, his trembling hand to take the cup from the proferring impossibility, and retract slowly enough to avoid catapulting the chattering china across the room. As it was there was a good deal of splashing before he managed to get it safe on the small table by the side of the chair. The _mouth_ made a creditable job of the tea-sipping, considering the handicaps it was forced to operate under; the wandering _eyes_ and all. And at length, after performing a most peculiar contortion in obvious reluctance to further prostrate its host by asking for a napkin, it voiced a thought which caught Mr. Harbinger's attention in spite of his badly shattered composure. "Doesn't it seem," it said musingly, almost to itself, "as though there ought to be some way we, that is to say you and I as we exist in our own Time, could right the wrongs of our respective situations." It wasn't a question--more of a spoken dream thought, with all the drifting oddness of inflection that those occasionally voiced wisps of desire usually possess. The very familiarity of that unmistakable kind of shading, its very humanness convinced, in a second, Mr. Harbinger of the reality of the thing which was occurring in his room, as all the fantastic things which had gone before had failed to do more than terrify him beyond enduring. He became, in that instant, a believer. Accordingly he said the, to him, proper thing. "I don't believe we've met." They talked, thereafter, for hours ... long into the night; undisturbed by the passage of time, not distracted, at least not very badly distracted, by the recurrent pangs of the unsated supper appetite; exchanging small bits of unhappiness in their separate lots, and each sympathizing heartily and hopelessly with the misfortunes of the other like two long-lost souls--as indeed they were. The upshot of it was that they resolved to meet again in the same manner when the conditions of their separate lives permitted, and to this end they set a series of future dates, calculated to find the disembodied man--whose name turned out to be Jones--at liberty to manipulate the forbidden Time mechanism of his age at an hour when his workshop was deserted, and when Harbinger might be expected to be at home after the day's job hunting--a prospect from which he shrank--or a day's work, if he should be fortunate enough to ever get another job. A possibility he doubted, due to the precipitate, not to say frank, or even to say vulgar, now that he thought of it, manner in which he had informed his previous employer of his decision to resign. But, meet they did, from time to time, and they had many good laughs over the pun in that one. When it came to puns, Jones was pretty adept and it was a puzzle to Mr. Harbinger how the language had changed so little in a hundred and fifty years.